I am the founder and president of the Business of Sports Network, a consulting and analysis firm which includes the The Biz of Baseball. Through the Business of Sports Network, research and analysis has been done for several clubs in MLB and the NBA, as well as work at a pro league level. Not content to work just on the management side, we have done work for several sports agencies. Other written work is at the freelance level for outlets such as Variety Weekly. I can be heard across the country as a radio guest each week, including a regular sports business segment on FOX Sports Radio Portland each Weds. My work has been sourced for analysis and commentary in the NY Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Washington Times, CNN/Money, MarketWatch, Crain's Business NY, Crain's Detroit Business, Crain's Business Chicago, The Deal, the Rocky Mountain News, Fox News, New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated.com, the NY Sun, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Tampa Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sports Review, Pittsburgh Post Gazette, St. Petersburg Times, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, San Jose Mercury News, the Oregonian, the Portland Business Journal, Sports Fantasy Monthly magazine, and USA Today Sports Weekly. I look forward to your comments, and can be followed on Twitter via @BizballMaury.

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Righting A Wrong, Marvin Miller Rightfully Belongs In The Baseball Hall of Fame

It's time for Marvin Miller to gain entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame

It’s time that baseball righted a wrong. It’s not as big as some wrongs (you can’t go back and remove the Jim Crow laws that permeated Major League Baseball for so many years, robbing great players simply due to the color of their skin), but there are other wrongs to be righted, and now is the time for one of them.

Today, 12 finalists that comprise the Expansion Era ballot for consideration to the Baseball Hall of Fame was released. Names like Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, Billy Martin, and Bobby Cox grace the list, but the man that should have been in years ago deserves his entry into the Hall of Fame, even though it is now posthumously.

Marvin Miller, the former Executive Director of the MLB Players Association from 1966 to 1982 has been passed over for inclusion for far too long. The idea that former commissioner Bowie Kuhn is in the Hall while Miller still waits is to say that the things that Kuhn stood against—players having the right to free agency, the ability of players to enjoy salary arbitration, the ability of the players to have an equal voice along with owners—is more valuable than what Miller stood for. Kuhn has been rewarded for fighting all that is the dynamic that we now see in Major League Baseball, largely built off the work that Miller and the players did.

The voters have gotten it backwards.

Miller was a man of strong ideals, and cared little if he thumbed his nose at those that would allow his passage into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He took the unprecedented stand in 2008 of telling the Hall of Fame to, basically, kiss off:

Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration and, at the same time, to ask that you not do this again… The anti-union bias of the powers who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the historic significance of the changes to baseball brought about by collective bargaining.

As former executive director of the players’ union that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering a pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers, and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91, I can do without a farce.

Miller passed away in November of 2012, and with it so went one of baseball’s most brilliant minds.

We can quibble whether Miller now would be a throwback. The union’s relationship with Major League Baseball is far different. While they are far from seeing eye-to-eye on every matter, baseball has enjoyed unheralded labor peace. When the current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2016, there will have been 21 years without a strike or a lockout. Under Miller, that caustic environment occurred almost every time a labor agreement ended. “Strike” and “lockout” seemed to be part and parcel with baseball for so many years.

But, the growth of baseball has its links to what Miller empowered the players to do. While Curt Flood did not garner players the right to free agency, Miller was there with him in his fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Shortly thereafter, the players won that battle when arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that players became free agents upon playing one year for their team without a contract, effectively nullifying baseball’s reserve clause, and thus, free agency was born. Miller was a man that came from the United Steelworkers Union and galvanized the players to become arguably the strongest union in America. Bowie Kuhn at the time tried to keep the players at bay, and came across a bumbling fool by comparison. In virtually every battle waged, Miller and the players prevailed.

Miller might seem out of place in the current union/management relationship, but his unwavering stance on player rights coupled with his incredible ability to communicate with the players and those he interfaced with on a level that was easily understood made him an incredible force. The book of baseball cannot be written without Miller in it, even if he never stood in the batter’s box or toed rubber on the mound. As Bill James penned in the forward for Miller’s autobiography, A Whole Different Ballgame, “If ever baseball buys itself a mountain and starts carving faces in it, one of the first men to go up is sure to be Marvin Miller.”

Red Barber, the Hall of Fame broadcaster said in 1992, “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the two or three most important men in baseball history.”

Current MLB commissioner Bud Selig said of him, “Marvin Miller belongs in the Hall of Fame, if the criteria is what impact you had on the sport, whatever way one wants to value that impact, yes, Marvin Miller should be in the Hall. Not a lot of support. Marvin should be in the Hall of Fame.”

That was 2009. It’s that “support” that has always been at question. Is it the “bias” that Miller said was occurring with so many former owners that Miller once raised the ire of? Likely. Is it that Miller hasn’t been able to garner 75 percent of the vote needed for inclusion? Absolutely. In near criminal terms, Miller has not garnered the vote to get in.

Before George Steinbrenner. Before Billy Martin or Tony La Russa, it’s time baseball righted the wrong and voted Marvin Miller into the Hall of Fame. After all, he should have been in years ago.

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